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Home , Comicopera, Harmony Row, Marianne Faithfull, Matching Mole, Michael Mantler, Rick Fenn

MICHAEL MANTLER EDITIONS

VOLUME TWO VOICES AND WORDS MANY HAVE NO SPEECH CERCO UN PAESE INNOCENTE HIDE AND SEEK 3 INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD WILLIAMS

“Singing Mike Mantler’s music demands paying attention set words from Beckett’s novel How It Is (Comment c’est) to to every note,” says, thinking back 45 years to music in a recording titled No Answer, featuring the trumpeter their first collaboration. “It is so worth it: his pieces are not , the singer and the pianist . just innovative. They are living, breathing things, with their The was released on Mantler’s own WATT imprint, its own organic logic, based on the texts he’s working with.” name also taken from a Beckett novel, and distributed by ECM Records (a relationship that continues to this day). Two had been writing instrumental pieces years later Mantler released The Hapless Child, settings of for large and small ensembles – notably the Composer’s stories by voiced by Robert Wyatt. In 1976 Orchestra – for ten years when he set about tackling the Wyatt and another English singer, , delivered the challenge represented by songs and singers, using voices and words of Harold Pinter – a writer famously defined as much lyrics to extend the emotional range of the music he had been by his ellipses as by his words – on an album titled Silence. making with instruments alone. Initially feeling unsuited to becoming his own lyricist, he looked elsewhere for the words So we come to Many Have No Speech, the first of three that would match and articulate the feelings he wanted to whose scores are reproduced in this second volume convey. He knew what he was searching for. “It is very of Mantler’s works. In this 1987 recording Beckett is joined as important to me that the words are abstractions of thought librettist by two other 20th century European poets, Ernst and feelings, rather than literal expressions of someone’s Meister and Philippe Soupault, while Bruce and Wyatt are everyday experiences,” he has said. “I feel very strongly about joined by a third singer, , accompanied by incorporating a certain kind of ambiguity in order to give the the Danish Radio Concert Orchestra, with Mantler’s listener as much latitude of interpretation as possible.” and the guitar of Rick Fenn providing instrumental solo voices.

Unsurprisingly, given those parameters, the writer whose Three languages are alternated – English, French and words provided his first inspiration was , the German – by the singers, all three native English speakers. In Irish novelist, playwright and poet who, from his adopted the early ’70s Mantler had originally begun his search for home in Paris, wrote in both English and French, sometimes words suitable for setting by looking for poetry in English translating his own work from one to the other. In 1973 Mantler before finding work in French that appealed to him, along 4 with poetry in German, his own native tongue. The juxtapo- to sing difficult music and identify with the equally difficult sition of the three languages reflects his own history – born words.” and educated in , a resident of the United States from 1962-1991, now living in Denmark and . Jack Bruce came down from Glasgow to in the early 1960s to play bass and bass guitar with Alexis Korner’s The pieces from Beckett (1906-1989) are poetic frag- Incorporated, the Graham Bond Organisation, John ments – “facing/the worst/until/it makes you laugh” – etched Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Manfred Mann, before joining Eric as if in stone, like splinters of feeling, sometimes mordant or Clapton and Ginger Baker in Cream, the first of rock’s super- sardonic but pulsing with humanity. Meister (1911-1979) lived groups, with which he also assumed the role of lead singer. in a German century full of death and darkness, his later work After Cream broke up in 1968, having achieved worldwide marked by his own experience of war: “Many/have no speech/ success, Bruce made several well received solo albums, Had I not/my fill of misery, I/would not/move my tongue.” including Harmony Row (Mantler’s favorite and inspiration), Soupault (1897-1990) was associated with Dadaism and the before joining ’ Lifetime, alongside John early Surrealists in Paris in his twenties, and spent six months McLaughlin and Larry Young. It was his appearance in a imprisoned in Tunis by the Vichy regime, an experience which leading role on Carla Bley and ’s epic Escalator may be reflected in his Tant de temps : “Time going by/time Over the Hill in 1971 that brought him into contact with Mantler, not going by/time you kill/time to count to ten/time you don’t with whom he recorded No Answer three years later before have/time good or bad/time to be bored/time to dream/time touring in 1987 in a Mantler sextet that also included Rick of agony/time you waste…” Fenn from , from , from the Mothers of Invention and from Henry And what voices Mantler chose to deliver these lines: Cow. three of the most distinctive singers to emerge from the British rock scene of the 1960s, very different from each other but Marianne Faithfull had no thoughts of a performing sharing the desire to experiment, to test themselves by career when she was spotted at a party by ’ pushing beyond the conventional, here embedded in or strug- manager, Andrew Oldham, in 1964. She earned a certain noto- gling to free themselves from the mass of the 41-piece Danish riety as a symbol of Swinging London before re-emerging in Radio Concert Orchestra. “The voices I like have a certain 1979 with Broken English, a startling personal album which dramatic quality,” Mantler has said. “I want them to have made an impression on Mantler. In 1987 he approached her character and to be naturally rough, somewhat unpolished, through the , a friend who had maybe even broken, with an expressive edge, yet musical. just made an album, Strange Weather, with Faithfull. Voices like these usually come from jazz or popular music, and the only problem is to find someone sophisticated enough 5

Robert Wyatt had been a founder member of the Soft (now recording for the first time directly for ECM Records, Machine, its drummer and occasional singer, before forming having left his own WATT label behind), the edges are soft- his own band, , in 1971. An accident in 1973 left ened, the textures warmed, the lyricism more generous. Here him unable to play drums but did not prevent him from Mantler employs the poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888- embarking on a series of extraordinary solo albums, from 1970), born to Tuscan parents in Egypt and associated as a Rock Bottom in 1974 to in 2007, and collabora- young man with the Futurist and Dadaist movements. After tions with many others, including Björk, , Brian experiencing war as a member of an infantry brigade in Italy Eno and Mary Halvorson. He remembers interpreting Soupault’s and France between 1915-18, Ungaretti abandoned and then Tant de temps – in the original French – with particular fond- re-embraced the Catholic faith and was associated with the ness. “I loved doing that! A case where the ’song’ was so Fascist regime before and after a professorship at the Uni- haunting – inspired, of course, by the achingly poignant poem versity of São Paolo from 1936-42. Expelled from a post at itself. I found that I loved singing in French. I’d learned some Rome’s University after the fall of Mussolini, he was reinstated French when I was a child, and learned something of the at the insistence of his colleagues. Much of his poetry is music in the language. And I was so grateful to Mike for the marked by a pervasive awareness of loss. In 1969, the year opportunity to use that.” before Ungaretti himself died, he was nominated – alongside Paul Celan, Nathalie Sarraute, Robert Lowell and others, for Opening with the sounds of Mantler’s trumpet and the the Nobel literature prize, awarded to Beckett. As with Meis- guitar of Rick Fenn – the two solo instrumental voices – over ter’s poetry, Mantler was introduced to Ungaretti’s work by the orchestra, the album contains 27 pieces within its 36 a friend, the German journalist and documentary film maker minutes, some of them – like Beckett’s Vieil Aller and Rien Birgitta Ashoff. Nul, both intoned by Faithfull – barely 20 seconds long. A mosaic of languages and voices is unified by the composer’s The hour-long suite, divided into four parts and con- distinctive tonal world, with its pervasive air of unease. “I taining 19 fragments of poetry, is scored for the sections of don’t deliberately write ‘dark’ music,” Mantler has said. “It’s the Danish Radio Big Band plus a string quartet and soloists simply there. I have no particular desire to write ‘light’ music, including Mantler and the Swedish guitarist Bjarne Roupé, and I would indeed find it difficult to do so. I don’t think that who fills the role previously played by , Larry and the human existence in general are such positive Coryell, , Philippe Cathérine, and events, so I don’t feel especially challenged to express the Rick Fenn. Ungaretti’s words are sung by Mona Larsen, a opposite.” Danish singer whom Mantler met soon after moving back to Europe in 1991. “Again, I had been looking for a voice prefer- On Cerco un Paese Innocente, recorded in 1994 in Copen- ably from rock and jazz rather than the classical world, and hagen, where Mantler lived on his return from the US to Europe Mona had actually been a very successful and popular 6 singer – with the Halberg Larsen group – in the 1980s. By the inadequacies of language. (She: “If you have nothing to say, time I met her, she had pretty much left the pop scene and maybe you just shouldn’t bother to say it.” He: “Speak for become a quite exceptional jazz singer.” They worked together yourself.”) In a cathartic passage midway through, both are in Mantler’s Chamber Music and Songs Ensemble before crying for help. Mantler demonstrates his ability to create his Larsen studied Italian in order to deliver Ungaretti’s texts, own particular kind of chamber music, deploying vibraphone brief but carrying the weight of aphorisms: “Beginning has or marimba, accordion (played by Hyldgaard), guitar, brass us singing/And we sing to make an ending.” and a string section to underscore the shifts of emotion and meaning. As with most relationships, the resolution resists The third album, Hide and Seek, recorded in Copenhagen simple closure. in 2000, adapts dialogue from a one-act play by Paul Auster, the American novelist (born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947) Having begun with Wyatt, let’s give him the last word celebrated for his New York Trilogy. Aware of Auster’s early on the experience of entering Michael Mantler’s world. “Not work, which he calls “quirky, intelligent, sparse,” Mantler read reading music,” he says, “I have to memorise other musicians’ the play – then unperformed – and liked the Beckettian set-up parts, as well as the lines I’ve been invited to try out with of two actors, a man and a woman, each in an upright wooden them, of course. The first useful hint I picked up working for box, spotlit on a darkened stage. Mike was this: whatever notes you might think would fit the flow of the chord sequences – well, they’re likely to be wrong. Against a score for 11 instrumentalists (including Mantler So, get used to the fact that the note you’re aiming for is the and Roupé), two singers deliver a conversation that explores least predictable. Except when it isn’t.” the awkwardness of communication. The man is Robert Wyatt; the woman is Susi Hyldgaard, a Danish singer (and pianist) who, although born in New York, grew up in Copenhagen. After studying musicology at Copenhagen University and pursuing her own solo career, she had worked with Mantler on his opera, The School of Understanding, in 1996. “She’s not only an astounding singer and personality,” Mantler says, “but also a consummate musician in general, a rare combi- nation. She brings an exceptional professionalism and musi- cality to everything she does.”

Hyldgaard also makes a perfect pair with Wyatt as they bicker and spar, prod and provoke, testing the limits and